There's always been a time, an end of secrets. I am here for all the ones who cannot speak-who are dead, who committed suicide, who are homeless, who are drug addicts. "I am Flo Kenny," a woman with a gray ponytail and sunglasses said carefully. One by one, the Alaska Natives-including Elsie Boudreau, the woman whom Rachel Mike had heard on the radio-took their turns before the cameras and microphones, talking softly and nervously and choking back tears. These abusers in Alaska, Wall said, were specifically sent to Alaska "to get them off the grid, where they could do the least amount of damage" to the church's public image. Roosa compared this lawsuit to the famous Los Angeles suits of 2001, which claimed 550 victims of abuse in a Catholic population of 3.4 million. Today, Roosa said, there are 17,000 Catholics in the diocese of Fairbanks, though there was a much smaller number during the peak of the abuse. This concentration of abuses is orders of magnitude greater than Catholic sex-abuse cases in other parts of the United States. Roosa and his associate Patrick Wall (a former Benedictine monk who once worked as a sex-abuse fixer for the Catholic Church) said they knew of 345 cases of molestation in Alaska by 28 perpetrators who came from at least four different countries. "As a direct result of Father Sundborg's decision," the suit alleges, "Father Hargreaves was able to continue molesting children, including but not limited to James Doe 94, who was raped by Father Hargreaves in 1992, when James Doe was approximately 6 years old." (The Oregon Province includes Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska as Provincial, Sundborg was head of the entire province.) The suit alleges that while Sundborg was head of the Northwest Jesuits, he had access to the personnel files of several pedophile priests, including one named Father Henry Hargreaves, whom he allowed to remain in the ministry. Among the alleged conspirators is Father Stephen Sundborg, who is the current president of Seattle University and was Provincial of the Oregon Province of Jesuits from 1990 through 1996.
The suit, filed in the superior court of Bethel, Alaska, the day before, accuses several priests of being offenders and conspirators. "We are going to shine some light on a dark and dirty corner of the Jesuit order."
"It was a pedophile's paradise." He described a chain of poor Native villages where priests-many of them serial sex offenders-reigned supreme. "They did it because there was no money there, no power, no police," Roosa said to the assembled cameras and microphones. The Jesuits have never let a single case against Father Poole go to trial. Exact figures aren't available because some of the settlements involve confidentiality agreements. Father Poole has never been convicted of a crime, but the Jesuits have settled numerous sex-abuse claims against him since 2005, in excess of $5 million, according to an attorney involved in four of those five lawsuits. In walked Father James Poole-a popular priest, radio personality on KNOM, and, according to allegations in at least five lawsuits, serial child rapist. The doctor asked if she wanted to see a priest. Rachel was found screaming in a pool of blood by her Auntie Emily and flown 229 miles to a hospital in Nome. Her arms were too short to put the rifle to her head, so she shot herself in her right leg instead. Her father, passed out on his bed, didn't hear the shot. To make sure the gun worked, Rachel loaded a shell and blew a hole in her bedroom wall.
Rachel walked to the bathroom to fetch the family rifle, propped in the bathtub with the dirty laundry (the house didn't have running water). "I just wanted to get away from the drinking." "When my parents were drinking, we didn't eat right," she says. Rachel was a drinker, depressed, and starving. She lived in a house with three bedrooms and nine siblings. An Alaska Native, Rachel was living in a tiny town called Stebbins on a remote island called St. O ne spring afternoon in 1977, 15-year-old Rachel Mike tried to kill herself for the third time.